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I forgot to announce that my paintings went up on September 30th in Carré d’Artistes Sedona gallery. When they invited me to paint for the Sedona gallery I hesitated. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. I’d been painting cityscapes of Paris for the last nine years. Several conincidences made me decide, yes.

The word Arizona kept popping up in unexpected places. For instance I was jogging through Luxembourg Gardens and saw a poster of the Grand Canyon. It was publicity for an exhibition at the Palais de l’Eau in Paris. I went to the exhibition and walked all the way back, along the Seine. That day I took excellent photos for the next series of Paris paintings I am planning.

Other things happened but Arizona was on my mind. When I was a child we went often to Arizona, driving through the Painted Desert. Everytime I saw a cactus, I had to touch it. My mother spent hours plucking needles out of my soft skin.

It’s funny how life brings you full circle.

One of my mannequins is for sale at Carre d’Artistes Sedona gallery, here is a photo from Instagram.

A bust of Marianne is present in every state school. Marianne wears a phrygian cap.

I think this fact is interesting because phrygian was somewhere in the middle east. The bonnet is considered to be of anatolian origin. This hat became a symbol during the revolution because it represents the pursuit of freedom. Emancipated Roman slaves wore a similar hat.

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I had a ball painting these. But I’m happy they are finished are ready to decamp to the galleries.

These mannequins were commissioned by Carré d’artistes and will be available in their galleries starting in August. Several artists were selected. I’m curious to see how the other artists finished their ladies. Carré will show the mannequins in their French galleries, all 13 of them, and some of their other galleries wordwide. I do not yet know where mine will be but I’ll post when I do.

The mannequin with the key had to be edited. I like this first version. It was my favorite but when the agent asks for changes, changes must be made. Agents know their clients.

Mannequins are coated with an industrial strength paint that nothing sticks to. Before I could lay the paint or spray it I had to sand the pieces. Mannequins come in parts. They are easy to put together and take apart but sanding them and gluing them as I had to do was painful. I hurt my back to the point that I had to see a chiropracter. Before I could see the chiro, I spent ten days painting or lying down. I painted with coffee, first thing in the morning, and painted with a glass of rosé in the evenings.

Here is an instagram video of me and one of the girls riding the elevator.

I sanded for two days straight on a city bench in front of my atelier. Parisians rarely address you, unless they need to tell you what you are doing wrong, so it was surprising that every person who walked by had a word for me. Seeing me with all those body parts on the bench in the sun brought them out of their sidewalk grimace. One man, a bit of a nutter, offered to model nude for me. After he left, a real nutter— more like raging insane entity— sauntered up. I knew he was beyond repair, not from the shine in his eyes but from the way he held his pants above his exposed butt cheeks. Luckily I’d finished sanding by then and decamped from the city bench.

After a short vacation I’ll be back in the atelier with a brand new and top secret project that I’ve been working on for a year. Here is an image of the silicon molds.

Silicon molds for the secret project.

Under the silicon is the secret sculpture. There are four and they are pairs. They will be completely different from my contemporary realism paintings. I’m going political thanks to #Brexit.

Before I can paint them, I have to sand down the surface because mannequins are coated with some industrial super-paint. Nothing sticks to it. This makes sense if you consider how abused they are during their lives. Shipped around, dressed, undressed, scratched and scraped. The super paint, whatever it is, makes them easy to clean, but a bitch to paint. Nothing sticks to it. Not even spray paint.

Royal pain in the butt, sanding is.

I never realized how ugly mannequins are. This is what we women are supposed to look like. This is today’s canon of beauty. Mannequins. They have monstrously long legs, toddler-sized torsos, male adolescent shoulders, and feet fit for a fairytail princess. Not the feet in the photo, those are mine.

Canons of beauty change through the ages and contemporary beauty canons differ from place to place.

The first time I understood what beauty canon meant, I was in Piazza Signoria admiring Giambologna and Ammanannti’s fountain of Neptune. Of course I’d never really looked at the nymphs. It was Neptune’s privates I admired. Those and his perfectly sculpted six pack abs. (I stole that line from a contemporary romance novel.)

My ex-husband, who stood next to me, said, “Guarda il collo di quello, è mostruoso.” Look at that one’s neck, it’s monstrous. He was looking at the nymphs. And probably watching me, while I stared at the rock hard privates.

We joked about the nymph coming to life. Rising from the marble basin and walking through the piazza. If she was human she would have been Frankenstein’s latest creation, the young Japanese tourists, who were photographing Neptune’s junk, would have run screaming, sure that Godzilla had returned.

Canons of beauty are not only monstrous mannequins. They touch everything and they evolve. What was beautiful yesterday is monstrous today.

Ever been to a dog show? Dogs have character. Man bred and selected them to work. Poodles were hunting dogs. They were shaved in certain places so they could move easily through the brush. Their coats were left long in specific places to keep them warm. In the advent of the dog show, dog breeds were selected for beauty and their looks were distorted.

Now I have some serious sanding to do so I can grace those three monsters.

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I can hardly believe a month has passed since my signing, the dédicace. It was a fantastic success.A big turnout. Lots of paintings sold. A big thank you Aurélia, Edith and Charlotte for your engagement.

This mannequin is one of the things I’ve worked on in the last four weeks. It’s from a painting I made of Place Colette. The building is the Hotel du Louvre. It’s lit from below with red lights. It’s at the end of Avenue de l’Opéra.

Lots of Parisian buildings are lit from below, often with white lights. During the Christmas season some buildings are illuminated by changing lights. It’s hypnotic to watch the colors of the rainbow flow over the façades of the Galeries Lafayette and Le Bon Marché.

I’m also working on sculpture but I won’t post any photos until the project is finished. It’s top secret. Something completely different.

Here are some numbers.

118 small paintings painted for the gallery since Jan 1st.
28 hours a week is my painting time, though I’ve worked until midnight some days.
17 different colors on my palette.
15 different size brushes is the average I use during a painting session.
11 large format paintings finished since Jan 1st.
5 different brands of paint on my palette.
1 painting I’ll work on for the two days of the signing.

I’ve joined Instagram to publish videos of me painting.

If you haven’t seen this already on my Facebook page, here is an example of one of the short videos I’m making.